Absorbent articles for personal hygiene, especially those for feminine protection, are typically individually packaged for hygiene reasons. The packaging prevents the articles from being soiled, e.g. by dust, unintended touching and the like. Tampons are typically packaged individually into wrappers for guaranteeing hygienic conditions. These wrappers substantially enclose the tampon and consist in most cases of plastic film, such as films made of polyethylene, polypropylene or cellophane. The usual way of opening such wrappers in order to release the tampon for topical application is to separate the wrapper into multiple segments, whereby creating an opening in the wrapper, through which the tampon can be released. An example for such an opening mechanism is disclosed on EP-A-597,446. This document teaches an airtight tampon wrapper having a line of weakness extending around the whole circumference of the wrapped tampon. By acting on the wrapper on both sides of the line of weakness the wrapper is opened, whereby being separated into at least two non-connected parts. However, it is to be noted that the opening procedure for such a wrapper, namely twisting two sides of the wrapper against each other, needs some explanation; it is not intuitively operable by the user. Other known possibilities for opening tampon wrappers are associated to the use of tear tapes, i.e. tapes extending around the perimeter of the tampon and being situated between the tampon and the wrapper, which separate the wrapper into at least two segments of wrapper material upon pulling the tear tape. This generates at least three pieces of waste material, which are the two segments of the tampon wrapper and the tear tape itself. An exemplary execution of the aforementioned tear tape mechanism is realized in e.g. Tampax® and Always® digital tampons. However, tear tape opening means are very intuitively operable by users without further explanation, because pulling on a graspable end of a tear tape is very convenient and based on a very simple and intuitively understandable mechanism. Thus, opening means with tear tapes are highly desirable for commercial tampon wrappers.
All current methods for opening tampon wrappers have drawbacks. They are either not convenient enough or not intuitively operable by the user or they are generating many pieces of waste originating from the wrapper. These pieces have to be collected and disposed. Furthermore, it is inconvenient for the user of the tampon to handle three or more pieces of waste material originating from the tampon wrapper during the process of inserting a tampon. Thus, it would be beneficial to have a tampon wrapper fully enclosing an individual tampon in a hygienically satisfying manner, which wrapper can be conveniently and intuitively opened by using a tear tape and does not generate more than two pieces of material upon opening for releasing the tampon. Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved tampon wrapper fulfilling the above requirements by being provided with an opening means comprising a tear tape and preventing the wrapper from becoming separated into more than two segments of wrapper material upon opening of said wrapper.